"They couldn't verify that those checks were due to a settlement," said Wennerberg, adding the bank contacted Enterprise to verify that the checks were part of a lawsuit, but were unable to do so"
He tried to cash three different large checks and the bank was unable to verify that these were actually legitimate. Calling the police was the correct thing tod do here.
It was sorted out, but he is now launching another lawsuit (most likely for large sums of money). This tells me more about the person trying to cash the check than the bank here.
"Wennerberg said the assistant manager who waited on Thomas was African American, and felt that something didn't "look right," so she called police."
More proof that this wasn't racial and more to do with the suspicious nature of trying to cash 3 large checks and being unable to verify.
i am not accusing this fellow of wrongdoing: but a truly cynical person could identify banks that have the worst OCR, glitch it, and create a litigable event.
if we can turn stop signs into pandas, i think we can cause a paper check to make OCR go kablooie.
> "This tells me more about the person trying to cash the check than the bank here."
That he's someone willing to fight racial discrimination in a court of law?
That's someone better than I, because I don't think I could go through the emotional process of a lawsuit unless it was very extreme.
> "and the bank was unable to verify that these were actually legitimate"
You know that banks have existing processes in place for this, right? And that "call the police within a few minutes" isn't part of the standard process?
As an example, https://firstquarterfinance.com/how-to-cash-a-large-check-wi... says: "Bank deposits and check cashing activities are governed by Regulation CC, a Federal Reserve banking regulation that governs the availability of funds and collection of checks ... Regulation CC rules state ... "For large checks over $5,000, banks can delay the availability for a “reasonable period of time.” The time period considered “reasonable” is two business days for large checks drawn from one of the bank’s own accounts (“on-us” checks), and up to seven business days for all other checks."
So the bank could have said, "this is a large check, it will take a couple of days to clear", and left it at that.
I mean, they've got his contact details, so he really was engaged in check fraud then they know how to get him.
> "More proof that this wasn't racial"
Really? Why? Black-on-black discrimination exists too. Eg, Turner v. The Hershey Co, https://www.leagle.com/decision/infdco20141015b00 where "Each of the other witnesses cited by plaintiff testified that Williams [an African-American] regularly stated that he had too many blacks on his sales team.".
The closest is: "He said the checks Thomas presented displayed a watermark that read VOID when they were scanned in a web viewer."
This is a feature of some security paper - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_pantograph says "In security printing, void pantograph refers to a method of making copy-evident and tamper-resistant patterns in the background of a document. Normally these are invisible to the eye, but become obvious when the document is photocopied. Typically they spell out "void", "copy", "invalid" or some other indicator message"
What it means is their system wasn't at high enough resolution. Which should be expected. Which means they are either extremely poorly trained, or they are looking for an excuse.
Note the following from the freep article:
> According to TCF's Wennerberg ... Thomas wanted to deposit the two larger checks in his bank account, which, Wennerberg said, had only 52 cents in it. And he wanted to cash the $13,000 check,
Does your bank generally tell people how much is in your account, and what your bank transactions are?
He tried to cash three different large checks and the bank was unable to verify that these were actually legitimate. Calling the police was the correct thing tod do here.
It was sorted out, but he is now launching another lawsuit (most likely for large sums of money). This tells me more about the person trying to cash the check than the bank here.
"Wennerberg said the assistant manager who waited on Thomas was African American, and felt that something didn't "look right," so she called police."
More proof that this wasn't racial and more to do with the suspicious nature of trying to cash 3 large checks and being unable to verify.
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